


Wisdom Teeth and Mushroom Clouds

by saiyanshewolf (gossamerstarsxx)



Series: Shot Through the Heart [6]
Category: Fallout (Video Games), Fallout 4
Genre: Anxiety, Banter, Cuddling & Snuggling, Dentists, Dreams and Nightmares, F/M, Getting to Know Each Other, Hurt/Comfort, Late Night Conversations, Literal Sleeping Together, MacCready is Whiny, Night Terrors, Nightmares, Non-Chronological, One Shot, One Shot Collection, Pre-Relationship, Sharing a Bed
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-04-17
Updated: 2018-04-17
Packaged: 2019-04-24 06:02:50
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 6,641
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/14349438
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/gossamerstarsxx/pseuds/saiyanshewolf
Summary: MacCready’s teeth are giving him hell. Antha wants to help. They end up helping each other.





	Wisdom Teeth and Mushroom Clouds

**Author's Note:**

> **Warnings** : Blood.
> 
>  **Notes** : Another thing that is a popular topic when it comes to MacCready: his teeth. Canonically, he's got a lot of problems with them, and fandom seems kind of split about it. Some people hate it and use mods to fix it, other people love it as part of his character and think it fits in well lore-wise. I tend to be of the second camp, but late last year when my teeth started driving me nuts, I started wondering if there wasn't some way to relieve MacCready of the pain associated with "bad" teeth without waving a magic mod-wand and giving him some kind of perfect movie star smile. Or maybe I just felt like projecting my intense anxiety about going to the dentist onto one of my favorite characters :) Either way, I decided that Antha would take MacCready to the dentist, and things evolved from there.
> 
>  
> 
> More on Antha [here](http://saiyanshewolf.tumblr.com/tagged/my+sole+survivor).

# 1.

"Why the hell does your mouth grow teeth you don't even need?!"

Antha struggles not to smile. "I asked myself the same thing when mine were coming in," she answers. "Speaking of...how old are you, Mac?"

He shrugs. His actual birthday is a mystery; the kids in charge of Little Lamplight when he was small had celebrated it in the late spring. "Twenty-two? Twenty-three in a couple months."

Antha blinks at him in astonishment. "You're...are you serious?"

"What, I don't look that old, do I?" He scowls. "I know my teeth are fuh - frigged up, but damn."

"It's not that," Antha says, waving a dismissive hand. "It's just...huh. I wonder."

MacCready arches an eyebrow. "All right, boss, you can stop staring at me like that any minute now."

Antha does no such thing. She continues to stare at him, head cocked to one side. "I might know what it is. When was the last time you shaved?"

The question takes him off guard. He scrubs his palm against one stubbled cheek - the one that isn't swollen - more self-conscious of his facial hair than he has been since it first appeared in Little Lamplight. He was fourteen, and the shadow on his chin had been a stark reminder that his time there was almost up. A shadow was more or less what it had remained until three years later when it finally deigned to grow in thick in enough for the scruffy goatee he's sported ever since. It still refuses to get thick enough for an actual beard.

"I dunno," he mutters at length, evading the question somewhat. "What does that have to do with anything, anyway?"

"I bet you've got a cute little baby face under there."

MacCready fights off the childish urge to stick out his tongue, settling for a marginally less childish huff as he looks away from Antha's bemused little smile.

"I'm not gonna shave it off, so you can forget it," he says, cheeks flushing.

Antha doesn't reply. She falls silent for so long that MacCready turns to look at her again, afraid some danger has caught her attention, but she is simply looking at him with a wistful expression on her face.

"What?" he asks, irritable and self conscious all over again.

Antha blinks, shaking her head as if to clear her own thoughts. "Nothing! It's nothing, I'm sorry. You're just... young."

MacCready rolls his eyes, annoyed, unwilling to think too much about her words. "I'm not that young," he mumbles. "How old are you _,_ anyway?"

As soon as the words leave his mouth he realizes how careless the question is, but Antha only flashes him a grin.

"Somewhere between twenty-two and 230," she answers. "But back to my point - do you remember having terrible headaches a few years ago, by any chance?"

MacCready's eyes widen in surprise. "How'd you know?"

"Same thing happened to me when I was around eighteen or nineteen," Antha replies. "My wisdom teeth were growing in. I'd get the worst headaches and the rest of my teeth would hurt too. It was miserable. Sound familiar?"

"Incredibly," he mumbles, "Which doesn't bode well for me, I think, but I still don't get where you're going with this, boss."

Antha sighs. "Just hear me out, Mac, all right?"

"Yeah, yeah, I'm listening."

"You see how my bottom teeth are crowded?" She bares her teeth in a deranged sort of grin, long enough for him to note that yes, her bottom teeth are a little too close together - though in the Wasteland that's not considered any kind of flaw. He nods, still wary of her intentions.

"It happened when my wisdom teeth were growing in," she says. "They put pressure on my other teeth and pushed them closer together. My top ones you can't tell as much, but I had a gap in my front teeth when I was young, so they had a little more room. When I got my wisdom teeth cut out, it stopped the headaches and the pain, but if I hadn't gotten them out, the pressure could have eventually been enough to cause some of my other teeth to crack. The back bottom ones would be first."

MacCready winces. "Which are the ones giving me hell. Great."

Antha nods. "Your top ones should be okay. Since you're already missing one up there, it kind of gave your wisdom teeth room to push things around. How did that happen? I don't think you ever told me, you just said it happened when you were younger."

MacCready runs his tongue into the gap behind his chipped right canine tooth. The space there is smaller than it used to be, come to think of it.

"This might be hard to believe," he says, "But somebody punched me in the face."

Antha's lips twitch in a smirk. "You don't say."

"I do say," he answers. "And the somebody was wearing brass knuckles. Shattered the damn thing, chipped the two beside it and one on the bottom. A friend of mine had to pull out what was left with a pair of pliers."

It is a poor explanation of events, given that the memory is enough to make his stomach churn. He had been deep in Raider territory with Arya and Butch when it happened, several days' worth of walking from anyone with actual medical training. Infection had set in after a couple days, complete with a high fever. Jabbing himself with Stimpaks every few hours for a day or two had helped that, but it had also made him sick to his stomach and too dizzy to walk. It had to come out - he understood that now - but at the time he had panicked. They had done the best they could with what they had, giving him shot after shot of whiskey until he was crying, falling-down drunk, but in the end Butch still had to restrain him, crying along with him as a silent, stone-faced Arya pulled out the remnants of his tooth with a pair of needle-nose pliers. He doesn't remember much of what happened afterward; his last memory before waking up with the first hangover of his life had been Arya sitting next to him, brushing the hair out of his face, her voice breaking as she told Butch it was her fault.

MacCready rubs the back of his neck, staring at the ground with faraway eyes. Had he ever told her it wasn't? He should.

_If I ever see her again._

"Mac? Hey, you all right?"

"Huh?" He looks up, startled out of his own head. "Oh, yeah. Sorry. Just…thinking. What were you saying?"

"Just that I can't imagine how painful that must have been," she says. "No wonder you get so anxious about having someone poke around in your mouth."

He shrugs. "We were miles from anywhere that could have done better, and it had to come out. Although it makes a good argument for why I prefer sniping."

"A damn good argument." Antha runs her tongue over her teeth as if imagining them being shattered by a blunt-force blow. "Christ. I guess that's worse than a few pressure cracks, but broken teeth are broken teeth. Your wisdom teeth probably damaged your back bottom teeth a few years ago, and they've just been getting worse ever since. The worse they get the more likely the rest of your teeth will follow."

"Fantastic." MacCready scowls again. "Pretty sure a few of them already have."

"Well, it doesn't help that you smoke," she adds with some reproach. "Honestly, out of all the fun, interesting ways to get cancer these days, I can't believe people still pick cigarettes."

"I've got a better chance of a bullet getting me than cancer," MacCready replies with an arch in his voice. "Besides, I knocked it off around you."

"You need to knock it off period," she sighs, "But that's not the battle I'm picking today."

"Could have fooled me," he mutters. "So which one _are_ you picking, then?"

Antha takes a breath as if preparing herself for an onslaught of opposition.

"There's a dentist in Vault 81," she says, "And Vault 81 owes me several huge favors."

MacCready narrows his eyes, the hair along the back of his neck prickling in apprehension. "Antha…?"

"Mac, you're in pain," she says, almost pleading. "If the dentist can get your wisdom teeth out and pull the back ones that are hurting you, he can fill in the rest to keep them from getting worse - and yes,it can get worse, Mac. As in death by blood infection worse. All the Stimpaks in the world won't save you if you end up septic."

"Fill in?" MacCready recoils, more disturbed by the sound of this process than a blood infection. Antha huffs in exasperation.

"For God's sake, Mac, look." She kneels next to him and opens her mouth, hooking one finger into her cheek to pull it away from her teeth. MacCready tilts his head, unsure what he's looking at until he sees it: some kind of dull reflective material flecking her back teeth.

She closes her mouth. "See? Fillings."

"What are they made of?" he asks. "Metal?"

"Silver stuff," she replies. "I was a big fan of sweets as a kid, and coffee as I got older, so I ended up with a mouth full of fillings. I've got them in the front, too, but they used to use something different for that...stuff that was teeth-colored, so you can't tell."

"Did it…" He trails off, hating the sound of what he's going to ask. "Did it hurt?"

Antha sighs again. She looks at her hands and picks at her nails for a moment before glancing up at him again, an apologetic look on her face.

"It didn't hurt when I had mine done because I had it done seven years before the war," she answers. "I don't know what kind of technology the dentist in Vault 81 has to work with, though. They should have local anesthetic, still, but I won't promise you that. If they don't have it, then yes, it will hurt. A lot. And getting your wisdom teeth cut out and the back ones pulled will be worse if he can't put you under. But it will also save you from a lot of pain in the future."

MacCready snorts derisively. "I'm in a lot of pain right now."

"Mac, I know," she whispers, glancing up at him through her dark lashes. "And if you don't want to do this, then I won't make you. I just...I hate it when you're in pain, especially if there's nothing I can do, but I think I might be able to help this time."

MacCready swallows hard. He hates when she looks at him this way - looks up at him with those gorgeous green eyes half lidded and that hopeful-wistful pout on her lips, as if all he has to do to make her the happiest person on the face of the earth is say yes.

It's a ploy, and she knows it, and he knows it, and yet here he is, with his face on fire and his tongue thick and stupid in his mouth, struggling to remember how words work.

"F-fine," he mumbles at length. "Fine, I'll...I'll give it a shot. Better than eating Cram for the rest of my friggin life, I guess."

Her smile is almost worth the agony pulsing into his jaw.

# 2.

Antha is manipulative as hell.

MacCready knows this by now - hell, it's the whole reason he's here - but if he's honest with himself he is also impressed. He can be manipulative when he wants, but his methods hinge on quiet intimidation or outright threats. Antha is more subtle, with a whole different set of tools at her disposal.

_Like those damn eyes._

He can't blame her too much - at 5'2, intimidation falls flat unless her reputation precedes her - but watching her charm the pants off men in positions of power irritates him as much as it fascinates him. The irritation part is something he tries not to think about, but he is always impressed by how easy it is for her to turn herself into a different person at the drop of a hat.

Antha is suspicious and sarcastic, and she moves through the world with the confidence of a man three times her size. Between the razor edge of her tongue and the small arsenal of weapons she carries around, it's a confidence she can back up.

That is not the Antha that stands in front of him right now, talking to a Vault dweller in a lab coat.

She stands with her hands clasped in front of herself. Her feet are close together and her shoulders are rounded as if she is trying to minimize the muscle she has built since she thawed. Her green eyes are wide and guileless, and she looks up through her lashes, speaking in a polite voice that is at least two octaves higher than usual.

It doesn't hurt that she isn't wearing her complicated leather armor and has her Vault suit unzipped well past her collarbones.

The Vault dweller agrees to her requests, stumbling over every other word and laughing far too often as he apologizes for Overseer McNamara's abscence. Before MacCready can even get a word in edgewise the Vault dweller leads them down a hallway and shows them to a small bedroom, sparsely furnished but neat.

MacCready notes the lone double bed and glances down at Antha, forgetting about the state of her Vault suit...then all but snaps his own neck looking up at the ceiling, a band of burning red rising across his cheeks and nose.

To his chagrin, Antha notices. Laughing, she thanks the Vault dweller and shuts the door behind him before zipping her suit back up to her throat.

"Sorry," she says, still grinning, "But trust me, Mac, you're not gonna be worried about the bed for long."

# 3.

Antha is right about the bed.

Before he does anything else, MacCready takes a shower. He is hard pressed to keep it to the five-minute limit, but he gets out when Antha calls him, changing into a clean t-shirt and Vault-Tec blue pajama pants. The borrowed clothes feel strange on his body, and when Antha asks if he  wants his clothes washed he agrees in a hurry, unpacking the pockets of his duster and military pants before handing them over. Antha does a double take at the sight of so much paper, but she doesn't ask questions.

After that, his memory gets foggy.

Antha leads him into a clean, clinical room, so bright that the light blinds him; she sits him in a chair that looks more like e it belongs in a torture chamber than the medical wing of a Vault. Then there are people in masks, and they try to put a mask over his face and he moves away, stiff and anxious, but Antha puts a hand on his arm and she whispers in his ear and then the mask is over his face and he's trying to count backward from 100, but he only makes it to 85 before a fuzzy expanse of blackness sets in. There are a few vague moments of consciousness, memories of blurry figures above his head, lit from behind and wielding strange instruments, but the blackness always returns.

The next moment of consciousness he remembers is Antha, her arm around his waist, his slung over her shoulder. She is half-carrying him down a bright hallway, an his feet are heavy, as if he's trying to walk with cinderblocks tied to his ankles, and that is so funny, hilarious, even, he can't seem to stop laughing. Even as Antha helps him into bed he is still laughing; it is the last thing he remembers about that day, his own laughter and Antha's smiling face above him.

# 4.

The next time he wakes - with a clear enough mind to stay awake - he finds himself shirtless and propped up in bed, every corner of his mouth throbbing with pain. Both his cheeks are full as if he's storing something soft and squishy inside of them for later. Disgusted, MacCready reaches into his mouth...and pulls out a bloody wad of gauze.

Horrified, he reaches in again and pulls out another...and another...another…

"Okay, let's see if you're making any sense yet...Mac? What the...?!"

Antha kneels on the bed next to him in a panic, presumably at the sight of so much blood. MacCready tries to snap at her, to ask her what kind of butcher she had given him to, but his mouth is still too numb to form the words. They come out slurred and slow. Blood runs down his chin.

"Goddammit, Mac, you're not supposed to take those out yet!" Antha reaches over and douses her hands in antiseptic before grabbing a handful of gauze from a jar on the nightstand. "Open your mouth."

MacCready glares at her, pressing his lips into a grim, bloody line.

"MacCready." Antha frowns at him. "Open."

He shakes his head, crossing his arms over his bare chest.

Antha sighs and closes her eyes, frustrated. For a moment it appears MacCready may get his way.

He should know better. To his surprise Antha crawls over him and settles herself astride his lap, leaning in close with an unnerving little smirk on her lips.

"RJ," she purrs, "Please open your mouth for me?"

MacCready shivers. She never calls him that unless she's teasing him, and he hates it, hates how intimate it feels despite the fact that she doesn't even know what it stands for, but as much as he hates it part of him loves it, too.

He swallows a mouthful of blood and does as he's told.

Antha beams at him as she packs the gauze into the back of his mouth. "Good boy!"

Heat rises into his cheeks. Unable to speak or even stick out his tongue, he settles for flicking her off. At leas his senses are still dull from the anesthetic; the warm weight of Antha in his lap might pose a problem otherwise.

"Does it hurt?" she asks, grabbing another wad of gauze and mopping up the blood from his chin and throat.

MacCready nods, then holds up a hand and seesaws it back and forth.

"Then let's not give it a chance to get worse, hm?" She leans over, douses her hands in antiseptic gel, and takes a Med-X syringe off the nightstand. MacCready frowns as she flicks off the cap.

"Don't give me that look, Mac. This is the best pain management they've got, and you'll need it," she says. "They did everything at once. Took out all four wisdom teeth plus both your bottom back teeth, did one root canal and crown up top and one on the bottom, then put in seventeen fillings. That would never have happened before the war, but I guess they've got to manage their anesthetic resources as best they can."

Before he can figure out how to ask what a root canal and crown are Antha injects him in the crook of his arm. The drowsiness sets in almost at once. His eyes flutter closed and as he sinks into the dark, he imagines that her lips touch his forehead.

# 5.

Several hours later he wakes to find the room in shadow save for one lamp. Antha sits in a chair next to the light, wearing a white tank top and a pair of too-big pajama pants much like his own, with the hems rolled up to mid-shin and the waistband folded over a few times to make them fit. With her nose in a book, she doesn't notice that he is awake, and MacCready doesn't try to get her attention, at least not right away.

He has never seen her in anything less than her Vault suit, and he can't stop looking at her.

Her hair is wet and wavy, and she keeps tucking it behind her left ear as she reads. Her bare arms and shoulders are lean with muscle and unscarred, and her painted toenails are bright blue, a relic from before the war. To his surprise, she seems to have no body hair - not under her arms, not even on what he can see of her legs.

 _Did she shave?_  MacCready runs his fingers through his own hair, bewildered. Daisy had mentioned that women used to shave off their body hair, but he can't imagine anyone who would bother keeping up with that in the Wasteland.

_Guess old habits die hard._

Antha yawns, stretching her arms above her head. MacCready looks away in a hurry; her tank top is perfectly decent, but…

He clenches his teeth out of reflex and the bright burst of pain that follows makes him forget Antha's new outfit. Sucking in his breath, he swears before he can stop himself.

"Mac?" Antha is by his side almost before he can look up, sitting on the edge of the bed next to him and putting a hand on his bare shoulder. "Hey, you all right?"

As he tries to speak, the gauze in his mouth muffles his voice. He points to his cheeks.

"Yeah, they need changing," Antha murmurs. "But you need something to eat before I shoot you up again."

MacCready makes a face, as if to ask how the hell he's meant to do that, but Antha only gives him a vague smile.

"Wait here. I'll be back."

He dozes off again for a while until Antha reappears, setting a covered bowl on the nightstand as she sits next to him again.

"Open your mouth."

This time he does as she asks without complaint. She pulls out the bloody gauze and tosses it, then cleans her hands with more antiseptic gel before grabbing the bowl off the nightstand and holding it out to him. It's full of questionable purple goop.

"They let me in the kitchen while you were knocked out," Antha says. Her smile is nervous. "It's gonna be awhile before you can eat anything solid, but I remembered how sick you are of Cram and how much you like sweets, so…"

MacCready arches an eyebrow, but he is far too hungry to be too suspicious. Accepting the bowl, he begins to eat what night be the most delicious substance he has ever put in his mouth.

"It's, um...it's supposed to be a mutfruit custard," Antha says, and MacCready realizes that she isn't even looking at him; she is gazing at her hands instead, picking at her nails as she speaks.

"I don't know how good it is, I haven't cooked anything in two hundred years." She snorts laughter at herself. "I was afraid to ask what kind of eggs I was using and I'm sure the milk is from a brahmin and I don't know how to cook a mutfruit, since I don't...I mean, I can't figure out what they're mutated _from_ , so I sort of cooked it the way I used to cook blackberries and I _think_ it worked but mutfruit are a lot bigger than blackberries, so if it isn't good you don't have to eat much, I promise, just enough so I can give...you…"

MacCready pushes the empty bowl into her lap. Antha glances up at him in surprise.

"I was starving, and that was amazing," he says, though he can't open his mouth well enough to do much more than mumble. "Guess you've gotta shoot me up again, huh?"

"In...in a minute," Antha says, smiling to herself as she sets the empty bowl to the side. "First you've got to rinse your mouth with this antiseptic stuff...I'm afraid it won't taste as good."

MacCready makes a face. "Fine. Give it here, I'll do it over the sink in case I gag."

Antha hands it to him, then stands up to let him get to his feet. She curls up in the chair again as he heads into the restroom.

After what might be the world's most eternal piss, he washes his hands and picks up the bottle Antha had given him. It's white plastic, labeled STIM-RINSE in neat handwriting. Something they'd concocted on their own, then.

As soon as he takes a mouthful of the stuff he nearly chokes, then cringes as it affects the empty sockets. It takes most of his willpower just to keep it in his mouth, let alone swish it around as Antha had told him to do, but he manages both. What he spits out afterward is a fizzing red mess that resembles Nuka-Cherry and smells like a melted Stimpak.

"Gross." MacCready wrinkles his nose, glancing up at the mirror. His pupils are huge and his cheeks are swollen.

Curious, he opens his mouth, trying to see what has changed. He can't see much; there is too much swelling and a _lot_ of blood, but despite the red tinge he can tell that his teeth at least appear healthier. The ones on either side of the gap are no longer chipped. To his surprise the one below looks as if the dentist had covered it in gold, which he supposes must be one of the crowns Antha mentioned. A multitude of silver fillings fleck his remaining bottom teeth. He can't see anything on top, but when he runs his tongue behind his front teeth, he can no longer feel the cavities that had been there for so long. The smoothness is odd; one of his anxious habits for the past few years has been sweeping his tongue over those rough spots.

A deep, dull throb of pain blooms into his jaw. MacCready closes his mouth and spits out more blood before returning to the room. He hasn't been on his feet for long but he is already lightheaded.

As he settles back into bed, he allows Antha to pack his mouth full of gauze, and accepts the Med-X injection with as much grace as possible. Soon he's out like a light all over again.

# 6.

The cycle repeats for  a week: he sleeps with a mouth full of gauze; he eats Antha's fantastic cooking; he rinses his mouth with the foul Stim-Rinse; he gets sick of the taste of blood.

By the third night he is so bored that he wants to climb the walls.

"Mac, if you sigh like a bratty teenager one more time…"

He sticks out his tongue, half expecting Antha to flick him off in return. Instead she covers her face with her hand and laughs.

"Fine," she mumbles, getting out of her chair and crossing the room to sit beside him on the bed. "I just started this one, so I'll read it to you."

MacCready shoves the gauze back with his tongue and mutters, "I can read, you know."

"I do," she answers. "But you'll knock out again in less than thirty minutes, so just get comfortable and listen."

MacCready huffs, but despite himself he ends up invested in the story and Antha's voice. He falls asleep as she reads.

When he wakes up again hours later, he finds her sprawled on top of the covers next to him with the book across her chest, dead to the world. He changes the wads of gauze out himself, then takes the book and flips around until he finds the last thing he remembers. In an effort to put off taking the Med-X, he reads for a while, even dozing off again without it, but when he comes to the throbbing hammer-strokes of pain in his jaw are too much. He injects himself with ¾ of the syringe and nods off again, but the smaller dose doesn't keep him under as well as the full one; he swims up to semi-consciousness several times during the night.

The first time he comes to with an unfamiliar weight against his side, and turns his head to find Antha curled up against him in a tight little ball, shivering. Before he can wake up enough to think about it he slings an arm around her shoulders and sinks under.

The next time, he wakes up on his side with Antha curled against his back. She is shivering again, and MacCready is still too fuzzy in the head for embarrassment or awkwardness. He kicks at the blanket until he's maneuvered it out from beneath Antha's body and draws it over them both before falling back asleep.

The last time he wakes up, he is the one shivering, and Antha is cocooned in the blanket.

Still more asleep than awake, he unrolls her and fixes the blanket again. Antha (somehow even less awake than he is, despite the fact that she is the sober one) huffs in annoyance and curls up against his side, muttering _Rude_ and _S'cold_ under her breath.

MacCready doesn't answer; he doesn't even see her move, only feels her next to him. His eyes are closed, and he's well on his way under as he puts his arm around her.

In the morning when he wakes up for real, Antha is across the room in the chair with her book. She offers an awkward apology for being a terrible bedfellow, and it takes MacCready a minute or two to even remember what had happened. When he does, he tries to ignore the heat in his face and pretends not to know what she's talking about.

Antha sleeps curled up in the chair until the end of the week. MacCready tries to argue with her, saying he feels well enough that they can swap out, but Antha won't hear of it even though it's evident that she isn't sleeping well - there are dark circles under her eyes and she spends most of her days yawning.

The night before they leave, MacCready is well enough to forego the wads of gauze and is down to a ¼ dose of Med-X. Antha injects him and sits beside him on the bed to pack their things.

When he wakes up a few hours later, Antha is passed out next to him again. The bag is on the floor beside her and her book is on her chest with her finger marking her place.

MacCready picks up the book, tucks a scrap of paper into it, rolls out of bed, and throws the blanket over her. He sprawls out in the chair and dozes off again, but he doesn't sleep for long.

# 7.

He wakes to the sound of Antha's breathing, rapid and labored and far too shallow. She jerks her head from side to side and clutches at the blanket with hands that have curled into claws.

MacCready starts to get up and go to her, but hesitates. This has never happened before. They've been traveling together off and on for a while now - long enough for her to wake him from nightmares several times - but he has never had to do the same for her, and has no way of knowing how she'll react.

Uneasy and undecided, MacCready watches her for a while longer, hoping the dream will pass and she will sleep soundly again, but her hands are white-knuckled, twisted deep into the blanket, and even at a distance he can see that the rise and fall of her chest is too quick, too erratic. She snaps her head back and forth in emphatic negation, and then she actually says it, mumbles _No!_ in a sort of panicked whisper, repeats it over and over again with rising desperation until MacCready can't sit still any longer.

He kneels next to her on the bed, trying to remember how she wakes him. With one hand on her shoulder he says her name, but Antha doesn't react. Her skin is cold and her muscles are stone beneath his hand; her hair clings to her cheeks, and MacCready has the unsettling feeling that it is due to tears instead of sweat.

He shakes her. Antha jerks her head, muttering under her breath, and MacCready reaches up and cradles it in his hands before she can hurt herself.

"Antha!" He raises his voice a little as a faint sense of panic creeps up his spine. "Hey, boss, wake up! You're okay, you're okay, boss, c'mon! Wake up!"

"Nnnnnn..." She struggles against his hands. "Nnnn...nnnno, no...no... _no, please!"_

She sits up so suddenly that they come close to knocking heads, but MacCready manages to move back in time, dropping his hands back to Antha's shoulders to steady her.

Her green eyes are wild as she fixes them on his face, and for a moment there is no recognition at all; she actually recoils from him, shrinking back against the metal headboard, and in those wide and panicked eyes MacCready sees the ghost of the woman she used to be.

Releasing her, he holds his hands up as if in surrender. "Sorry, boss. You were having a pretty rough dream."

The blank stare remains for the space of a heartbeat before recognition begins to sink in. Antha leans forward with her elbows on her knees and cradles her forehead in her hands.

"Sorry." Her voice is cracked and dry. "This is why I should've slept in the chair...I always dream when I'm in a bed. Still not used to...to being alone, I guess."

MacCready says nothing. He gets to his feet and heads into the bathroom, emerging with a cup of water. He nudges it against one of her hands and sits next to her again as she takes it.

"Thanks." Her hands are shaking; she holds the plastic cup in both of them like a child as she drinks before setting it on the bedside table.

"Gonna be all right?" He asks at length, trying not to remember what she said, how she hadn't dreamed while she slept beside him.

Antha nods, finger-combing her hair back into place on the left half of her head, but she doesn't look at him.

"You...d'you wanna talk about it, or…?"

A faint smile crosses her face at his hesitation. She glances up at him through her lashes as she picks at her fingernails.

"There's, uh...there's not much to it." She shrugs. "You'd think I'd have nightmares about Shaun, or Nate, right? I do, sometimes, but...mostly it's just...I dream about the bombs."

MacCready shudders as the weight of the two hundred years separating him from Antha settles onto his shoulders. He has never thought about the fact that she had _been_ there. She so rarely discusses her life before the war that remembering the truth always takes him off guard, and he starts to speak before he thinks better of it.

"Did you see…?"

Embarrassed, he stops himself short, but Antha knows what he means. She picks at a fingernail and nods.

"I mean people expected it, obviously," she mutters. "They would never have built Vaults otherwise, but I...I didn't really believe it would happen. I didn't believe either country would let it happen. It was too...I mean, they _knew_ better."

MacCready can't understand her naivete, but he keeps his mouth shut. He has never lived under the government Antha knew and would never trust such an institution even if he did, but she is from a different time. It isn't his place to judge, but as usual Antha seems to read his mind. She looks up at him and laughs, the sound of it soft and rueful in the quiet.

"I know how that sounds, trust me." She sighs, still bending her nail back and forth. "I had just finished law school, I was full of faith in the system. Stupid of me, considering my own husband had such awful PTSD he spent every Fourth of July dead drunk in bed wearing earplugs."

She clenches her fists and leans back against the headboard. "Sorry. Ancient history, right?"

MacCready shrugs. "Not to you."

"Only because I'm ancient history too." Her lip curls and her voice is bitter. "Walking, talking pre-war antique, that's me. Listen, you lay down, I'll just…"

"Tell me about the bombs, boss," MacCready murmurs. "I want to know."

Antha huffs. She shifts to the edge of the bed, sitting next to him with her heels propped on the bed frame, staring at the floor. For a moment MacCready is sure she's going to ignore him and walk away, but at length she begins to speak again.

"I didn't believe it would happen and then it did," she says. "But I still didn't accept it. I kept thinking it was nonsense. It wasn't real. It was a false alarm, and they'd announce that soon. They _had_ to."

She crosses her arms across her chest as if she is cold. "Then...we...we were standing on the Vault platform. It was up on a high hill overlooking the countryside below. Hell, I can take you there, next time we're in Sanctuary."

She sighs. After a moment or two she bows her head and continues. "Nate turned to look at me, to ask if I was all right, and he was rocking Shaun...it was still morning. Behind him the sky was bright blue, and the trees were gold and red and yellow...it was such a beautiful day. I'd do anything to have a picture of that, of _them_. To have that last good moment with me forever."

She falls silent, eyes on the ceiling.

"We heard it first," she says at length. "This deep, distant rumble that wasn't anything like thunder. It seemed to echo into my chest, but I maybe that was just fear. Then the flash. When I opened my eyes...the mushroom cloud...it was massive. The day seemed to fast-forward from a nice fall morning to a sunset in hell. The sky was turning orange, and the cloud was spreading...and then they started lowering the platform."

She shivers and hugs herself more tightly. "I dream about that cloud, okay? It's stupid. It's a mushroom cloud. But I dream about it. One minute I'm with Nate and Shaun on the platform and the next I'm alone with the mushroom cloud and the fire in the sky. Sometimes the platform goes down and I'm safe. Sometimes it doesn't. Most of the time I wake up wishing it hadn't."

MacCready swallows past the knot this last statement ties in his throat. It isn't as if he can judge - how many times has he wished he'd died with Lucy? - but it shakes him and Antha seems to realize it.

"Forget I said that." She rubs her hands over her face. "Any of it. That's an order, or whatever."

"Whatever you say, boss," he murmurs. "Why don't you go on back to sleep? I think I'll stay up and read. Been sleeping too much this week as it is."

"Mac, I'm fine."

"Didn't say you weren't." He picks up the book they had been reading and jerks his thumb over his shoulder at the other side of the bed. "Just lay down. I'm gonna sit up here where the light's better."

Antha side-eyes him for a moment, but if she detects any ulterior motive she says nothing. She only huffs and does as she's told, curling up like a cat with her back to MacCready.

He sits up against the headboard and reads for twenty minutes - long enough for Antha's breathing to even out. When he is certain she is asleep sets the book on the floor, tented open as if it had fallen out of his hand, then rolls onto his side and goes back to sleep.

Antha has no more dreams.  


**Author's Note:**

> Please see the end notes from Woman Out of Time for my headcanon on Stimpaks.


End file.
